The Coast Guard icebreaker Louis St. Laurent has freed innumerable ice-locked vessels, explored the unseen depths of the Arctic bottom and hosted prime ministers and the world’s top Arctic scientists. Recently, however, the bright red workhorse of Canada’s marine Arctic presence has been doing not much of anything. For the past two weeks, the 111-metre icebreaker has been stranded off the Nunavut coast by a loose propeller nut.

Since Sept. 27, the ship’s bobbing red form has been a familiar sight from the shores of the 1,500-person Arctic hamlet of Cambridge Bay.

The ship was stranded by a maddeningly simple malfunction: A nut on the centre propeller that was knocked out of place by no more than a few inches.

Nevertheless, with the extra demands placed on propellers in icy waters, “It is surprising that this does not happen more often,” Rob Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary told the Iqaluit-based Nunatsiaq News.

Since July, the Louis St. Laurent has been in the arctic primarily on a mission to prop up Canadian arctic sovereignty claims. Using seismic testing, researchers have been mapping Canada’s offshore boundaries in order to bolster the country’s arctic resource claims before the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The broken propeller “prevented us from doing further seismic work,” wrote passenger Hans Böggild in a September 27 blog post.

In late September, most of the scientists on board motored into Cambridge Bay and flew out on a scheduled air charter. A crew of 48 remain onboard, along with a team of Vancouver-based underwater ship repair specialists. The team of cold water divers are scrambling to get the ship operational before freeze-up, which is only weeks away.

The expedition was conducted in conjunction with the United States Coast Guard vessel Healy. Following a round of food and knot-tying competitions with their Louis St. Laurent counterparts on Sept. 22, however, the U.S. vessel returned safely to port in Seattle.

The Louis St. Laurent experienced frequent propeller malfunctions into the 1990s due to the propellers being constructed from inferior metal. The Coast Guard repaired the problem in 2000 by installing stainless steel propellers. Regardless, last year the ship experienced a similar propeller shaft breakdown.

Built in 1969, the Louis St. Laurent is due for a long-awaited retirement in 2017, when the $720 million John Diefenbaker is set to take its place. “We feel it is a very capable vessel and it can do the job but, at the same time, it is now 40 years old and it is getting time to think about a replacement,” George Da Pont, commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, told a Senate committeee in 2008.

The new icebreaker will be setting sail into an increasingly crowded Arctic. In 2013, the Chinese plan to launch a $300-million icebreaker designed to allow Chinese researchers to maintain a constant Arctic presence. In 2014, Russian officials are planning the relaunch of the nuclear-powered Sovetsky Soyuz icebreaker.

The Canadian Navy currently has almost no Arctic presence. “The Navy can only operate in northern waters for a short period of time, and only when there is no ice,” reads the Navy’s website. By 2014, however, the military is set to receive a set of six to eight Arctic/Offshore Patrol Ships with limited ice breaking capability.